Wednesday, June 3, 2009

2nd pull of the night, after a wipe on P1 to a spawn overrun. Hehe... squeee! We made it look easy. I wish we'd gotten it frapsed.

Group makeup:

Prot warr (MT)

Prot pally (cleanses, loldps, and offtanking in p1/p3)

Survival Hunter

Arcane Mage

Blood DK

Destro Warlock

Feral kitty

Ret Pally

Holy Priest

Resto Druid

The Backstory:

We'd had a messy raid the night before, between lag, dps bugs (no energy for you, kitty!), a pug shaman with tank-assist problems, and a full-out server restart. We were wiping to Freya. FREYA. Tempers were short, and we were wary of what would happen to our raid this 2nd night, especially as two of our main dps were going to be running late (kickball and martial arts) and another was unavailable.

We form the raid with 7 players, and decide to pick up one of our raiders' pvp buddies, a ret paladin, as an 8th to help fill in the holes. We get through the trash to Ignis just as one of the late players shows up, so we're able to 9-man Ignis easily enough (we've 8-manned him before), and then Razorscale. Getting into our stride, we were now feeling quite a bit more confident about this night than we did before, after the "badness" of the 1st night. Our 10th raider arrives in time for Freya, and she goes down like a sack of bricks, securing our confidence in ourselves.

Mimiron was a joke. We spent more time explaining the fight to our pvp friend than we did actually fighting the boss, though we did have to pick him up off the floor after a laser barrage. Vezax crumbles in a similar one-shot in spite of a mishap where our 3rd healer--the prot pally--forgot to switch to her holy kit and was thus healing in her tank gear.

It's 10:20 then, about an hour left to our raid night, and we're on a bossblood high. "Yogg, yes?" I ask. "I'm feeling good about this, I think we've got a good chance to get him!" The others agree, and we decide to take a short break to stretch, snack, bio, et cetra, while the entirety of Yogg Saron is explained to the PvP pally.

Yogg that night:

Pull 1:A gas cloud is clipped. Then another. I run circles around the room kiting one loose mob, then another. Oops, someone else clipped another cloud. We get the typical overrun, with shadow volleys eating us alive while MCs go out of control. We wipe comically, with my husband's DK attempting to chop my treeform to bits with his big axe. We regroup, spirit unbroken.

Pull 2:A gas cloud is clipped. Will it be another cascading wipe? Ah, somehow we catch up! Whoot @ the dps! We make it to P2.

This is where things got eerily smooth. Constrictors would die within a few seconds of grabbing someone (even when I got grabbed while sitting in a sanity well 1/3 of the way around the room from the dps). Corruptors were falling over from DoTs. Crushers were being munched. Cleansing felt easy, as there were rarely more than 2-3 corruptors up at a time. Melee would make it to portals full-health and free of debuffs. Melee was also making it out of the mind with half health at minimum. I actually got to throw moonfires and wrath at tentacles, around my usual reminders for everyone to check their sanity.

My husband calls out from the Mind, "We can kill the brain right now."MT: "Awesome, do it!"Kae: "[to Holy priest], let's get to the door before the adds spawn."MT: "Yeah, everyone head to the front of the room in front of Yogg."OT: "And check your sanity!"

Yogg gurgles angrily at us. I tremble, wondering how far up to the door I should go while I stack up HoTs on the MT. My back to the room, my camera facing the door, I can't see what's going on, except that I see the tank's health dip in my Grid frames, but I see no monster waving tentacles around coming into my screen.

My eyes widen. I check my oRA2 MT list to scan their targets' health, and watch as one of the adds drops. A nervous grin spreads across my face; we'd never gotten past the first add spawn on P3 before. Ever. We'd always wiped as the adds ran about one-shotting people.

The two tanks chat, picking up adds and directing others to turn around when purple beams shoot from the evil skulls, and reminding everyone of sanity checks regularly. To get in-range to help heal the dps as they catch flecks of angry-skull-damage, I move closer to the boss, away from my haven by the door. I have to bounce around a bit as adds spawn around the room, some too close to me for comfort, but it's no biggie. I'm a druid, bouncing around is in my nature.

The melee start twiddling their thumbs, "What should we go kill?" one asks. I finally rotate my camera around to look towards the boss, over my tree's shoulder, and see there are no adds currently up. The MT responds, "You can go dps the boss, I guess, just switch back to adds as they spawn." So we proceed. Yogg dips. My excitement grows as his health bar--ever my main target--drops down to 15%, 9%, 5%... 2%.

Yogg dies, and a collective, happy sigh of relief washes over ventrilo. We did it. Yogg-Saron has been defeated.

7 comments:

Our dps was so fast that they'd munch an immortal guardian down in a blink, and it'd give us time to focus-fire Yogg for a few seconds before the next spawned. We did have to use one of the battle-resses: the ret pally got immortal aggro before the tanks had touched it (I think it spawned on him and he just went to town), and it one-shot him :) It was the ret pally's first time in Ulduar, and first time ever seeing that phase (or P2 for that matter, including the brain room).

It rocked. I had trouble getting to sleep afterwards, from the adrenaline!!

PS: we usually do Vezax with 3 healers, our prot pally respeccing to holy, but last night when she re-specced, she forgot to swap her gear, and had about 10k mana and nil for crit/spellpower... and somehow we still managed to one-shot Vezax. I gave the holy priest a high-five after that!